See also Process Signals and Events - Sending and handling signals and events.

See also Process Limits Permission and access restriction (files, resources, etc)

See also Program Environment Variables - Getting/ Setting program environment variables

See also: Remote Process Creation and Control - Methods of starting and controlling processes remotely. (telnet, login, rexec, et al.)

Up to Execution

See also Process Creation and Control covers child process control (like sending signals), renice, fork, et al

How do I trap control characters/signals?

How can I sleep() or alarm() for under a second?

How can I do an atexit() or setjmp()/longjmp()? (Exception handling)

What's wrong with using backticks in a void context?

How can I call backticks without shell processing?

How do I timeout a slow event?

How do I make a system() exit on control-C?

See Also

(PERL predefined variable) $CHILD_ERROR The status returned by the last pipe close, backtick (``) command, or system() operator.

(PERL predefined variable) $SYSTEM_FD_MAX The maximum system file descriptor, ordinarily 2. System file descriptors are passed to exec()ed processes, while higher file descriptors are not.

(PERL predefined variable) $ARGV contains the name of the current file when reading from

(PERL predefined variable) @ARGV The array @ARGV contains the command line arguments intended for the script.

(Perl builtin function) chdir EXPR Changes the working directory

(Perl builtin function) die LIST Outside of an eval(), prints the value of LIST to STDERR and exits with the current value of $! (errno).

(Perl builtin function) exit EXPR Evaluates EXPR and exits immediately with that value.

(Perl builtin function) kill LIST Sends a signal to a list of processes.

(Perl builtin function) sleep EXPR Causes the script to sleep

(Perl builtin function) wait Waits for a child process to terminate

(Perl builtin function) waitpid PID,FLAGS Waits for a particular child process to terminate

AtExit - Many operating systems allow you to specify an action to be taken when your program exists. ANSI C specifies that this is to be done with an atexit() function; the AtExit Perl module duplicates this for Perl. Also see END blocks, defined in ./doc [Perl] {oss}

Getopt::Long - Implements POSIX option processing with GNU extensions, so you can parse darn near any command-line option. See Getopt::Std. [Perl] {oss}

Getopt::Mixed - GNU-style option processing, with features of both Getopt::Std and Getopt::Long. See the Getopt::Std module. [Perl] {oss}

Getopt::Std - Option processing for command lines. Let's say you want users to provide "height" and "width" arguments to your program like so: my_program -h 7 -w 10. But you also want to handle my_program -w 10 -h 7. Getopt::Std makes this easy. [Perl] {oss}

Getopt::Regex - Lets you handle command-line option processing with regular expressions. [Perl] {oss}

Other Libraries, Functions, and Components